Technical stuff

Version 1 AF9005

This dvb-t stick uses a chip from afatech, called AF9005
Support was added May 2007 in the main hg repository and has gone into the 2.6.23 vanilla kernel.

Version 2 AF9015

USB ID: 0ccd:0069

TerraTec brought up a new version of the stick.

It seems you can't distinguish between both versions by the packaging nor the device itself.

The new version announces itself with the USB ID 0ccd:0069 and the product name "Cinergy T USB XE Ver.2".

It uses a successor of the af9005, the af9015. There is now support in the vanilla kernel (>=2.6.28) for this Chipset, see Afatech AF9015.

It also uses a Freescale mc44s803 tuner. This tuner has a working driver at [2] which is merged into the main repository since Feb 2009 and will probably be part of the vanilla kernel >= 2.6.30.

Version 1 firmware upload trace

This shows the first bytes of usb communication when using this stick in windows (traces using patched usbmon on linux (to get all the bytes), vmware on linux, winxp in vmware, terratec driver in winxp).

Additional Firmware For Debian

The kernel module needs some code from AF05BDA.sys which is distributed with the original Windows driver. Some distributions don't need this files. But on my Debian system DVB-T stopped working after an upgrade to Debian Squeeze 6.0. They removed the code from the kernel for copyright reasons and replaced it which a loader which extracts it directly from /lib/firmware/AF05BDA.sys each time the driver is used.

Different versions of this file exists. Only the one from the BDA Driver 6.3.2.1 will work. It is included in Cinergy_T_USB_XE_App_Drv_XP_4.98.exe which can be downloaded from the Terratec Webpage. This is a self extracting Zip archive that can be unpacked using unzip or wine.